Disbelieving Dark

 

Messenger (c) October 30, 2012

“Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

A  strangely compelling Boardwalk Empire character–a World War I  sharpshooter who carried his talents back to a morally complex civilian life during Prohibition–dispensed this worthwhile advice at an Easter gathering.

A fellow blogger whom I count as a cyber-friend writes movingly of her own life, love, and loss of a beloved mother.  She wrote this morning that, surveying the bright colors of visible reminders of el dios de la muerte, she wishes she were “one of the haunted.”

She does not receive from her the mother the signals she hoped to receive–those elusive thin spaces in which she still can feel her presence.

I do not consider myself a believer in the afterlife in a traditional sense.  But I am unquestionably  haunted. I recently fled one haunted home, but remain surrounded by what I choose to believe are signals from Jim.

After my husband Jim spoke of his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer, one of our friends looked at him–a young, outwardly robust, healthy man who betrayed no sign of illness, let alone such a devastating one–and said, with a hint of the abject disbelief we all felt, “The good kind or the bad kind?”

My ever-unflappable and good-natured husband replied, with his trademark wry grin, “I’m not sure there is a good kind of pancreatic cancer.” Continue reading “Disbelieving Dark”

Bright Copper Kettles: Mourning to Moonshine

During Jim’s final December, just after we learned his illness was terminal, Vijay Seshadri published a wonder of a poem called Bright Copper Kettles:

Dead friends coming back to life, dead family,
speaking languages living and dead, their minds retentive,
their five senses intact, their footprints like a butterfly’s,
mercy shining from their comprehensive faces—
this is one of my favorite things.
%d bloggers like this: